This Day in Minnesota History

Today's Date: July 26

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1820	Colonel Henry Leavenworth performs a marriage ceremony for Lieutenant Green, one of the officers at Fort St. Anthony (later called Fort Snelling), and a woman named Miss Gooding. Leavenworth has legal authority to perform marriages not as post commander, but as Indian agent for the lands east of the Mississippi, so he and the couple cross the river for the ceremony.
1892	Almost eight inches of rain falls in St. Paul in a twenty-four-hour period, causing Lake Como to rise fourteen inches.
1895	Pierre Bottineau, the "Kit Carson of the Northwest," dies. Bottineau, the son of an Ojibwe woman and a French fur trader was born in the Red River valley about 1817. Fluent in Ojibwe, French, Dakota, and English, he worked for Henry H. Sibley in the fur trade beginning in 1837. From 1850 to 1870 he led expeditions to Montana and British Columbia and was a guide for Isaac Stevens's transcontinental railroad survey of 1853. During an attack by Dakota forces at Fort Abercrombie in 1862, Bottineau slipped through the lines and went to get help. After retiring in 1870, he spent the rest of his life at Red Lake.
1896	A bicycle built for thirteen―requiring twelve people to peddle and one person to steer―tours St. Paul at the height of the 1890s bicycling craze.
1937	Governor Elmer Benson refuses to give a business license to the Pinkerton Detective Agency, a notorious union-busting group.

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